When Quentin Tarantino chose the small eastern German town of Sebnitz for a scene in his Inglourious Basterds, he was likely drawn to its beautiful scenery, not to actual Nazis. Yet, along the road to Sebnitz across Saxony, a several-meter-high flagpole stands tall in a backyard, displaying the black, white, and red flag of the Second Reich. While hoisting this flag is not generally banned, it is today one of the most blatant ways to express nostalgia for the Nazi regime.
Sebnitz, a Saxon town with about ninety-five hundred residents, is typical of many eastern communities in several respects. One of them is that almost half of eligible voters here backed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Sunday’s state elections. The scores for the AfD in both Saxony and Thuringia (also in the former East Germany) were moreover remarkable insofar as their respective AfD state associations are considered particularly radical. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, has labeled Saxony’s AfD — using a distinctly German phrasing — “verified right-wing extremist.”
In the Thuringian contest, the AfD topped a state election for the first time, with just over 30 percent support. In Saxony, the AfD was again the second-strongest force, but its gap behind the long-dominant conservatives of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) narrowed significantly. Meanwhile the left-wing Die Linke slumped to 13 percent in Thuringia and 6 percent in Saxony.
None of this was unexpected. In early summer, members of Die Linke came together in Sebnitz to prepare for the upcoming campaign. “We want a presence in the region, and we can’t do that if we only organize feel-good events in the big cities,” said Susanne Schaper, one of…
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Auteur: Konstantin Nowotny
